Rev Girl (27 page)

On the raised platform, with the blow-up WSEC archway overhead, Clover glanced at the other girls on her minute: Joanna, the Australian girl, and … Lasha Moore. She considered giving Joanna a thumbs-up, but decided against it as she wasn't even looking in her direction. Lasha was glaring, and Clover glared right back, but a figure beyond her caught Clover's eye.

Lasha's father was standing right at the edge of the start area, just inside the barricades, arms folded, sunglasses on. A scowl on his face. He kept checking his watch, and even yelled an instruction to Lasha, ‘Remember, you're either on the brakes or on the throttle no coasting!'

Lasha rolled her eyes, and looked down at her fuel tank, fidgeting with her breather hose.

The whole scene suddenly gave Clover a powerful sense of Déjà vu. She knew it all too well. She'd lived it, so many times, before Ernie had realised how his competitiveness was affecting his daughter. And at that moment, the truth struck Clover: Lasha didn't hate her. Lasha hated her dad. Clover was her only real competition in juniors, and as long as Lasha was winning, her dad would've stayed off her back.
I bet he's nice to
her, when she wins.
Clover had, inadvertently, made Lasha's torture worse. It was the pressure that she herself had struggled to deal with. Lasha's way of dealing with it was by taking it out on Clover.

Despite all the pain Lasha had caused her, she couldn't help but feel sorry for the girl. Maybe she'd learned more about forgiveness from the incident with Sera than she'd realised. She never thought that pity would be an emotion she'd associate with Lasha Moore.

Without even thinking, Clover looked back at Lasha and smiled. She even gave her a quick thumbs-up.

Lasha looked stunned, but then her whole face seemed to soften. Clover could have sworn the girl looked relieved.

She was lucky enough to have a dad who realised his mistakes. Maybe Lasha's would too. Maybe, one day, they would be friends.

Clover smiled, and looked back at the track. She was shivering from the cold, but was lit from within with a peace and calm she'd never experienced before. The arrows of the course were clearer in front of her. Now that she'd put aside her hatred of Lasha, she had more energy to focus on the ride ahead.

And she wanted to win.

Clover wrapped her shaking fingers around the rubber grips, pulled herself forward, and jumped up and down on the seat a few times, to feel the movement of her suspension, warming it from the chill of the damp air.

Being with her bike always ignited that passion within her, the flames of hunger to succeed and become number one. She knew she needed to cast aside any seeds of doubt and be confident if she was going to have a chance of even finishing. She was ready. She had prepared and trained as hard as possible.
Yes
, she told herself.
Clover Canada is
going
to finish the six-day!
Prove to everyone who'd ever doubted her or tried to pull her down. Prove to herself that she'd made the right choice, in leaving Dallas and their old life behind.

Clover tightened her grip on the handlebars, and then shook her hands out, to flick away her nerves. She surveyed the man in front of her, resplendent in his bright yellow vest with ‘Oficiální' then ‘Official' written in bold across the breast. He raised the Czech Republic flag.

One minute till blast off.

As Clover pulled her goggles from the pocket of her riding jacket, light drops of rain began to fall. She quickly slipped her goggles on, and pulled the strap down the back of her helmet, swiping a gloved hand across the lens to clear the few drops of water blotting her vision.

Flag to half-mast.
Thirty seconds to go.

She reached for the start button ready to fire the engine to life as soon as their start minute ticked and the man dropped the flag. She wiggled her toes in her boots, as the cold was starting to freeze them stiff. She had to ignore the throb in her ankle, where she'd broken it in Florida. It still played up in the mornings, especially in the cold.

A familiar voice cheered from behind the spectator's barriers, which lined either side of the street in front of them.

‘Go, Clover!'

Clover squinted through the masses of people standing, shivering, umbrellas up. Clover smiled when she spotted Leslie, beaming at her. It felt so good to see a familiar face, one she'd been waiting a long time to see at a race. Good to have her mother for support.

Leslie waved, and pushed through the crowd, right up against the orange barrier. Her undivided attention and encouraging smile brought warmth to Clover's heart.

Clover smiled and nodded with recognition, even raised her hand in a wave, then she glanced down at her engine, checking to make sure she'd remembered to pull the choke out, to help her cold engine fire.

She looked up, and the world fell silent. At that moment, she was alone just her and her machine. She felt the start button beneath her finger, leant forward, elbows up and ready to race. Her breath was warm against her cold cheeks, misting the guard of her helmet. The beat of her heart fell into rhythm with her breath.
It's only day one of six,
she told herself.
Be smooth and smart.
There would be plenty of challenges and obstacles in this race, without her adding difficulty by losing her head. She knew from pre-walking the tests that the last day included a steep ski hill test, and the rest had several Enduro special test phases with gnarly obstacles like rocky creeks, logs and bog holes. She'd find respite in the three grass track tests marked with bunting in open paddocks but even they were in hilly, off-cambered terrain, some designed as corkscrews, to turn you around and around until even your bike was dizzy. The trail, especially, was rumoured to be perilous. And this rain, now coming down in heavy drops, would only intensify the difficulty. This would indeed be the greatest challenge in Clover's seventeen years. But she was ready.

She held her breath, as the man in the Official's vest nodded at each of the girls, looked back at his watch … and dropped the flag.

Clover pushed hard on the grey button, giving her bike some throttle. It took three goes for the engine to ignite. The deep,
ba-ba-ba-ba
, of her 250 was music to her ears.

She let it idle, before slowly bringing up the RPM.

Joanna kicked at her bike, cursing under her breath. She would only have one minute to get it going, before she would fail the cold start test and be heavily penalised. Lasha had already taken off, hardly letting her bike get warm.

Clover clicked hers into gear and eased the clutch out, careful not to let the wet, slippery levers fling from her fingers. The bike lurched forward, and she was off. Wind whipped at her cheeks as she shifted to second gear, out the gate to Parc Ferme and onto the drenched bitumen, only pausing long enough to reach down and push her choke back in. She was thankful Ernie had insisted she wear her Yamaha jacket over her jersey and chest protector. Right now she didn't care if it made her look masculine, she would have been freezing without it. The thick fabric kept the cold out, as the sides flapped in the force of the breeze.

The road was lined with people, waving flags and cheering in all different languages. A few Canadian supporters leapt forward from the throng, patted Clover on the back, yelling words of encouragement. Children bundled in padded jackets and scarves ran along beside her until their little legs grew too weary to keep up.

Clover revved it out, clicked up into third gear, standing up on the pegs, gripping the bike with her quivering knees, to give her arms a chance to relax. She leant left with the inclination of the road, to follow the red Day 1 course arrows past a row of houses, through a right-hand turn and onto a muddy cart track, around the edge of a field and up into the narrow trails of the misty Giant Mountains.

Pairs of glazed-over eyeballs, popping from the heads of fish that still had their scales on, gaped up at Clover from the silver serving trays of the hotel dinner buffet.

Clover dropped her plate to her side. After the toughest day she'd ever experienced on a motorcycle, she was ravenous for a good meal. She'd had little time to eat during the race, as she was late into nearly every time control just had time to fuel her bike, before taking off again. Despite this, Clover still wasn't famished enough to eat fish that looked like they'd just swum in from the ocean. Ernie had suggested that they go to town for dinner, but the thought of hauling her sore, spent body too far from her bed had seemed ludicrous. Now, though, she wished she'd listened.

Clover looked away from the gawking Nemos, who seemed to scream,
‘Please, don't eat me!'
and back at her table in the middle of the room, where Ernie was grinning at her.

She shook her head and poked out her tongue. Then stuck a few fingers in her mouth, pretending to gag, before moving along the table of the strange smelling food, in the hope of finding something she might be able to stomach.

After taking scoops from a few trays, Clover made her way back to her table, plonked herself down being graceful and elegant was far past being a concern, as her aching legs longed for rest then looked over at Leslie and wrinkled her nose. ‘I thought they were gonna start serving pasta once the event started?'

‘I did ask,' Leslie said. ‘Just, wait here I'll go remind them. Surely they can get it organised for day two.' Leslie wiped her mouth with a napkin and went to rise.

Clover laid a hand on her arm. ‘It's all right, Mom. Finish your meal. We'll ask on the way out.'

‘Thank you, Clover,' Leslie said.

‘That's cool.' Clover eyed the soggy slices of potato dumpling and rice with squares of what she assumed by the colour were vegetables, wishing a steaming plate of Fettuccine Alfredo was smiling back.

She had just squeezed her eyes closed, to prepare herself for a fork-full of colourless goop, when Leslie poked her in the ribs.

‘Look, here come the Aussies.'

Clover let the slop fall to her plate and watched the Australian Team file in handsome as ever. Her heart swam with excitement.

The racers from Down Under took the long, rectangular table at the far end of the room. It looked like the entire squad was present, with at least twenty riders, including Joanna, who sat down silently at a two-seater table adjacent to the main one. She was joined by a man Clover assumed, by his grey hair and worn face, was her father. Clover peeked around Ernie, who offered the perfect cover for her staring.

The tanned dudes from Oz were better behaved and more businesslike than the night Clover had first spotted them at the bar. Some of the younger-looking ones stared off into space, as tired as she was. The hot guy with blonde hair and blue eyes Sexy Surfer, as Clover had decided to call him had taken one of the prime spots at the head of the table and was talking animatedly, regaling all who would listen with stories from his day out on the trails. A few of the guys closest to him were listening, watching his lips intently, but the others were more interested in what a black-haired guy had to say. Clover instantly recognised the rider's strong build and his ruddy, handsome face. Ryder Black.

If the blonde guy was Sexy Surfer, Clover thought, then Ryder was the Sexy Pirate. She'd been able to tell, just from the poster she had of Ryder on the back of her bedroom door, that he smiled all the time. This was confirmed as she watched him now, his full lips parted in that contagious grin, revealing cheeks with super sexy dimples. The only flaw in his features made her even more drawn to him. His nose was thick in the middle, with a white scar across the top, as if it had been broken. His eyes were lighting up as he raised his hands to emphasise a crucial part of his story. Warm, reckless eyes, brown, with flecks of green the colour of her own. What she hadn't noticed in the poster were the wrinkles around his eyes.

Ryder had all the guys around him transfixed. He seemed perfect to Clover a strong, vibrant soul. Her body wanted to fall towards him, as all the other faces and voices in the room faded. She wished Ryder would look up, spot her, maybe even come over and introduce himself. But he was much too consumed in his story, in his familiar company all those cool people she didn't know.

When the guys around Ryder, and the bubbly blonde girl too, cracked up laughing, Clover wished she knew what he had said, wished she could join in the joke. The other people around her again came into focus, and the disappointing reality of her position in the Enduro world hit her with all the force of a high side crash. She'd left the Silvertown ‘in crowd' behind when she broke up with Dallas, and here she was very much on the outside, too. It was a realisation that made her feel colder than ever before.

For a few more moments, she kept her eyes on Ryder's face, but when he didn't glance her way, she looked back at her slimy food just as a hand clamped onto her shoulder. The table fell silent, everyone staring behind Clover's head. She turned to see the pale blue eyes and heart-shaped face of the blonde Aussie girl. She looked a bit older than Clover, and was wearing a lot of makeup. She grabbed a chair and spun it, so she could sit with her arms resting on the back, and pushed up next to Clover. Leslie darted to the side to make room.